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“Even though May 35 is over,” Victoria Hui writes, “my students working with me but spending their summer in China continue to have no access to Gmail or searches.”The University of Notre Dame political scientist, using one of the code names the Chinese have developed for “June 4,” suggests that this year stringent censorship may continue long after the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.And Professor Hui also reports that this year her students have had difficulty “jumping over”—circumventing—China’s “Great Firewall” of web censorship with VPNs, virtual private networks.

Others in China have had even worse experiences.“Google has been blocked forever!” Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research in Beijing tells me in an e-mail yesterday.“Our company’s back end runs on it so we have to run VPNs 24/7.This has been true at least since 2011.”

This year, starting in late May, Chinese authorities began interrupting Google services across the board.In addition to restricting access to Search and Gmail, they also targeted the Calendar, Images, Maps, and Translate functions.Beginning June 2, Google’s advertising platform was blocked. As a co-founder of GreatFire.org, a site that monitors censorship, told the New York Times, “This is by far the biggest attack on Google that’s ever taken place in China.”

The comprehensive attack on Google was long-lasting, suggesting that it was motivated by more than just a desire to censor information about Tiananmen.Moreover, this assault occurred while Beijing engaged in an obviously concerted campaign against American companies.Chinese authorities in the last month have prohibited the installation of ’s Windows 8 on government computers and launched an investigation of with a view to removing its high-end servers from the networks of state banks. State media also engaged in a coordinated blitz against .

Moreover, the microblog of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship publication, publicly promised to “severely punish the pawns of the villain.” The villain was identified as the United States, and the pawns were listed as Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo! in addition to Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.The People’s Daily comments were echoed inChina Daily, the central government’s official English-language newspaper, a clear indication the broadside was directed from the top of the Chinese political system.

At first glance, it appeared that Beijing’s moves against U.S. businesses were merely retaliation for the five indictments of officers of the People’s Liberation Army for cyberespionage.Yet the indictments, announced by Attorney General Eric Holder on the 19th of last month, were merely a defensive response—and an inadequate one at that—to what David Hickton called “this 21st century burglary.”

Hickton, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the Chinese military officers, demanded the end to the cyberthefts, and he had every right to do so.China’s cyberthefts each year cost America around $110 billion and 2.1 million jobs.At the clip of more than a trillion dollars a decade, the take from the greatest heist in history is increasing fast and cannot be ignored.

China’s attack on American business is sometimes said to be in response to the Snowden revelations, that Beijing wants to remove the products of U.S. tech companies from its networks because they help America spy on China.Yet this appears to be just an excuse because Chinese authorities, who had thoroughly penetrated the U.S. intelligence community for years, have undoubtedly known the general outline of what the former NSA contractor revealed beginning last year.So if this is no more than an excuse, what is the cause of the anti-Americanism evident in Beijing recently?

There are two points.First, the recent assault on American business could be a continuation of a trend apparent during the later years of Hu Jintao’s rule.Then, Chinese leaders began to think that either they did not need foreign companies as they did in the early years of the reform era or the balance of power had swung so far in their direction that they could dictate terms to foreign companies wanting to do business in China.“China’s blistering attacks on U.S. tech firms is more than quid pro quo over cyberspying charges,” writes Patrick Thibodeau in Computerworld.“It’s a signal of China’s growing confidence in its own technology capabilities.”

This change in thinking manifested itself in Hu Jintao’s indigenous innovation product accreditation rules, which were meant to force foreign companies to surrender technology.The we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-you mindset is obvious in the recent attacks on American business.

Second, there are hints of disunity following the leadership transition from Hu to the current ruler, Xi Jinping, in November 2012.“The most easily discernable sign of weakness in the power structure, or an inability to fully control a government, is purges,” writes analyst Bruce Bechtol in his latest book.Bechtol was thinking about North Korea when he penned those words, but the principle applies to all regimes.In China’s regime, Xi’s continuing purges indicate that infighting is ongoing and could even get worse if targeted elements, especially Jiang Zemin’s Shanghai Gang or Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League, strike back.

If Xi is not in firm control in Beijing, then he or others in the regime might be trying to unify factions within the Communist Party by identifying the United States as one of China’s enemies.Senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army, leaders of the Party’s most powerful faction, have already done that, going on a number of anti-American binges recently.For instance, two Chinese generals at the just-concluded Shangri-La Dialogue dismayed onlookers with mocking and vitriolic comments directed at Washington. One of those flag officers, Wang Guanzhong, was Beijing’s senior representative to that Asian security forum.

And if all this were not bad enough, the Chinese political system is finding it hard to pull back from its instinctive anti-foreign sentiment.State enterprises have for decades been the primary beneficiaries of protectionism, and it looks like they are now using their growing political clout to fan the anti-Americanism for their own benefit.Almost none of the entrenched interests have a reason to help U.S. business.

So some leaders in Beijing are arrogant, others are insecure, and state enterprises are taking advantage of the situation.The result is that American business will be the target of the Chinese political system, probably for a long time to come.U.S. companies, unfortunately, are now facing something worse than a trade war.